16/11/2005 - Gemma – Plato’s cave

Today I found Gemma wondering in the basement sculpture studios. Told her that I enjoyed her work and showed the work I’ve been developing with Craig this year. She started telling me about her paintings, which look like street walls sliced up and brought into the studio/gallery. She was claiming that the main subject of her work was the idea of outside and inside and that she was struggling with the dissertation about that same topic. She said she was trying to read an essay by Derrida but she wasn’t very clear about the subject of that work. I told her about Plato’s cave allegory (The Republic) and how it was important for defining ideas such as inside and outside. Obviously I told her about the shadows and the illusions people take as real. I also made a correlation between the streets she is picturing and the outside as the truth she was trying to bring inside so that others in the fake environment (studio/gallery) would struggle with. This gave not just a political but also a philosophical dimension to her work that was struggling to find its place in the contextual and intellectual sphere. I believe she is going to take it forward and use it in her dissertation. I felt good for helping her and I got the feeling that these things should be the reason why people join a fine art BA. Nonetheless I must admit that I also felt a bit like I imagine a tutor feels when he has a useful tutorial. I know the ideas I shared with her are as crucial as they are simple but I was aware she was struggling with Derrida and she didn’t need Schopenhauer to feel depressed and realize that “life and dreams are leaves of the same book: reading them in order is living, skimming through them is dreaming”.